From the New Republic Online:: "But why couldn't Dean aspire to more than just not finishing third? We're even tempted to argue that Dean has a better shot of winning the presidency in a Dean vs. Gephardt vs. Bush race than in a Dean vs. Bush race. For one thing, he'd be the only guy in the race who opposed the Iraq war. And, if all the polls taken over the last year are any indication, that opposition puts him on the same wavelength as at least 35-40 percent of the country. That issue alone could win him the presidency."
I was trying to think of some kind of snarky comment I could make about this, but it is so profoundly stupid that I don't even know what it would be. This guy needs to have his pundit license revoked. He has posted two updates to this where he basically engages in further and more spectacular contortions of reasoning in order to "save" his argument. His first update begins with: "Of course, you could argue that having two people in the race from the left-side of the political spectrum would make the person on the right, in this case George W. Bush, a lock. On the other hand, [stupid line of argumentation follows]..." Thing is, there is no other hand. The first hand is exactly right. As things stand right now, there is no reason to think that Dean and Gephardt, if they ran separate campaigns, would get more votes combined than would Bush, much less than Dean alone would get more votes than Bush in a third-party race. I mean, if he thinks that if it was a three way race Dean would only need 35-40 percent of the vote to win, he's basically saying that Dean + Gephardt would get 60-65 percent of the vote together. I mean, barring a scandal on the order of the release of secret Bush NAMBLA tapes, how completely unable to process any of the available information about the American electorate do you have to be to think that there is some chance that less than 4 in 10 voters are going to show up in November to vote for Bush?
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